One project’s scraps are not necessarily trash but rather they can be another project’s treasures! That is precisely how the “VT Mini-Quilt Bookmark” came into being years ago.

When a quilter is trying to finish a quilt top, piecing all of the hundreds (sometimes thousands) of pieces back into a finished masterpiece, there are shards that just don’t fit…which inevitably end up in the “scrap” box. After finishing my hundreth or so quilt, that “scrap” box was looking mighty full indeed! What could I possibly make with all those little snippets of fabric?

The answer came at a carnival (the Norwich Fair), of all places, at which I was showing my homemade quilts and sewn items at a booth there. A lot of children accompanied their parents through the craft booth section, and some of them had sticks with glitter and shards of gilded ribbon and paper stuck on the end of them that their gullible parents had purchased for them at another “craft” booth. Needless to say, to me, this was not a craft, but rather a throw-away item, soon to be either broken or cause harm to some other unsuspecting sibling, and thus be taken away and trashed anyway. This to me was an ultimate waste of money on the part of the parent, but it kept the kids under somewhat of control for a short time I guess although I wonder if any of those “craft” producers had liability insurance, had someone poked someone else’s eye out?

I decided right then and there to come up with a small inexpensive item aimed at kids that could be useful but yet fun sometimes too. I tried to make a bookmark, and after several attempts, decided to make it basically out of scraps so that it actually looked like a little quilt, and yet it had to have something to make it fun along with functional….then my cats gave me the idea of making a rope fringe on the end of each one (they all loved to charge around the house with a scrap of rope and shred it to pieces like it was a mouse or feather or something). You see, I was working part time for the Cobble Mountain Hammock Chair Company, weaving their chair seats from cotton rope at home, and turning in the completed chair seats for them to complete the assembly at their
East Corinth VT old mill turned into hammock shop. There would be 3 or 4 inch pieces of this cotton rope left over at the end of the shuttle, and they were being trashed, so I thought maybe I could unwind them and somehow sew them into the tops of the bookmarks…then if I went one step further and pulled all the twisting apart, they would be the ultimate “fringe” at the end of the bookmark with which to tickle the cheek of one’s nearest sibling or friend, and voila! There was the birth of the VT Mini Quilt Bookmark!

The next year at the fair, they sold like hotcakes, and are still going strong, even though I do not attend the fair anymore. I have them set up on my counter in a box with a bookworm next to it, and children are intrigued with the idea along with their parents who I am sure, are also hoping that it will lead their child to actually read and use it in their books to mark their place. And they are still made the same way, one at a time using scraps along with some well thought out basic sewing parts to make them cost effective and make them look good over and over again. The “scrap” box is still pretty full, even though five different scraps goes into each bookmark, as it seems like the scraps have been multiplying on their own in that darned box! But that is ok, because there are plenty more bookmarks to be made!